Perhaps a little more appreciation by others would have forestalled this compensatory egotism, and given Nietzsche a better hold upon perspective and sanity. But appreciation came too late. Taine sent him a generous word of praise when almost all others ignored or reviled him; Brandes wrote to tell him that he was giving a course of lectures on the "aristocratic radicalism" of Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen; Strindberg wrote to say that he was turning Nietzsche's ideas to dramatic use; perhaps best of all, an anonymous admirer sent a check for $400. But when these bits of light came, Nietzsche was almost blind in sight and soul; and he had abandoned hope. "My time is not yet," he wrote; "only the day after tomorrow belongs to me." 1

The last blow came at Turin in January, 1889, in the form of a stroke of apoplexy. He stumbled blindly back to his attic room, and dashed off mad letters: to Cosima Wagner four words "Ariadne, I love you"; to Brandes a longer message, signed "The Crucified"; and to Burckhardt and Overbeck such fantastic missives that the latter hurried to his aid. He found Nietzsche ploughing the piano with his elbows, singing and crying his Dionysian ecstasy.

They took him at first to an asylum,2 but soon his old mother came to claim him and take him under her own forgiving care. What a picture! the pious woman who had borne sensitively but patiently the shock of her son's apostasy from all that she held dear, and who, loving him none the less, received him now into her arms, like another Pietà. She died in 1897, and Nietzsche was taken by his sister to live in Weimar. There a statue of him was made by Kramera pitiful thing, showing the once powerful mind broken, helpless, and resigned. Yet he was not all unhappy; the peace and quiet which he had never had when sane were his now; Nature had had mercy on him when she made him mad. He caught his sister once weeping as she looked at him, and

1 E. H., 55.

2 "The right man in the right place," says the brutal Nordau.

he could not understand her tears: "Lisbeth," he asked, "why do you cry? Are we not happy?" On one occasion he heard talk of books; his pale face lit up: "Ah!" he said, brightening, "I too have written some good books”—and the lucid moment passed.

He died in 1900. Seldom has a man paid so great a price for genius.

CHAPTER X

CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS: BERGSON, CROCE AND BERTRAND RUSSELL

T

I. HENRI BERGSON

1. The Revolt Against Materialism

HE history of modern philosophy might be written in terms of the warfare of physics and psychology. Thought may begin with its object, and at last, in consistency, try to bring its own mystic reality within the circle of material phenomena and mechanical law; or it may begin with itself, and be driven, by the apparent necessities of logic, to conceive all things as forms and creatures of mind. The priority of mathematics and mechanics in the development of modern science, and the reciprocal stimulation of industry and physics under the common pressure of expanding needs, gave to speculation a materialistic impulsion; and the most successful of the sciences became the models of philosophy. Despite Descartes' insistence that philosophy should begin with the self and travel outward, the industrialization of Western Europe drove thought away from thought and in the direction of material things.

Spencer's system was the culminating expression of this mechanical point of view. Hailed though he was as "the philosopher of Darwinism," he was more truly the reflex and exponent of industrialism; he endowed industry with glories and virtues which to our hind-sight seem ridiculous; and his outlook was rather that of a mechanician and an engineer absorbed in the motions of matter, than that of a biologist

feeling the élan of life. The rapid obsolescence of his philosophy is due largely to the replacement of the physical by the biological stand-point in recent thought; by the growing disposition to see the essence and secret of the world in the movement of life rather than in the inertia of things. And indeed, matter itself has in our days almost taken on life: the study of electricity, magnetism, and the electron has given a vitalistic tinge to physics; so that instead of a reduction of psychology to physics-which was the more or less conscious ambition of English thought-we approach a vitalized physics and an almost spiritualized matter. It was Schopenhauer who first, in modern thought, emphasized the possibility of making the concept of life more fundamental and inclusive than that of force; it is Bergson who in our own generation has taken up this idea, and has almost converted a sceptical world to it by the force of his sincerity and his eloquence.

Bergson was born in Paris, in 1859, of French and Jewish parentage. He was an eager student, and seems to have taken every prize that turned up. He did homage to the traditions of modern science by specializing at first in mathematics and physics, but his faculty for analysis soon brought him face to face with the metaphysical problems that lurk behind every science; and he turned spontaneously to philosophy. In 1878 he entered the École Normale Supèrieure, and on graduating, was appointed to teach philosophy at the Lycée of Clermont-Ferrand. There, in 1888, he wrote his first major work-the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free-will. Eight quiet years intervened before the appearance of his next (and his most difficult) book-Matière et mémoire. In 1898 he became professor at the École Normale, and in 1900 at the Collège de France, where he has been ever since. In 1907 he won international fame with his masterpiece—L'Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution); he became almost overnight the most popular figure in the philosophic world; and all